2049

Preface

Hi, my name is Aaron. I’m 18 years old and I’m a freshman studying electrical engineering at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California. I play sports, like hanging out with friends, and stay up late sometimes procrastinating and watching Youtube. Essentially, I’m just your average guy. This recording could have fallen into pretty much anyone’s hands. Why it found itself in my hands, I have no idea. But I’m glad it did.

I woke up one morning and noticed a black flash drive on my desk. It wasn’t my roommate’s and it wasn’t mine. I asked him if anyone might have left it in our room, and he shrugged his shoulders. I noticed the red numbers, 2049, on the back were drawn in with a red sharpie or something. I decided to pop it into my laptop and take a look to see who it might belong to.

The flash drive had no name and only one single audio file. The audio file read the same as the marking on the flash drive: 2049. I dragged the file into my laptop and took out the flash drive (probably not ejecting it properly) and stuffed it in my junk drawer. I just left the file on my computer for a while, and almost forgot about it actually. But one night, I decided to listen to it with my headphones. It sounded like some lame audio sketch for a screenplay or something, or some type of group project, but I kept listening. Something about the way the story unfolded, the voice of the narrator, the organic feel of the recording, made me feel like what I was listening to wasn’t just some group project or fictional screenplay. It sounded real. And the story, as crazy as it was, stuck in my mind. I couldn’t get it and my thoughts about the recording out of my head for weeks. Finally, I decided to do something about it.

What you are about to read is my transcription of the audio recording I found. All of the words are his words and not mine. I will repeat that because it’s important. This is not a story that came from my own unimaginative engineering mind, this is Thomas’s story. I obviously cleaned it up a bit, took out some of the ums and likes and put some chapters in with a few timestamps to help the narrative flow, but other than that, these are all completely Thomas’s words. I gave my first draft of the transcription to a few friends and they persuaded me to try to get it published. So, that is exactly what this is: a published version of my transcription.

You can think whatever you want about this transcription. You might think it’s blatantly fake, the product of someone with too much time and a vivid imagination, and hey, you’re probably totally right. Or you could be like me and think it’s real. Either way, real or fake, I think Thomas’s story is fascinating. If you have any questions about the recording, you can always contact me at [email protected].

Everything you read from this point forward will be Thomas’s words. (Hopefully you actually read this preface, and you aren’t like me and just skip every single preface of every book ever. But if you did, that’s cool too.)